About Me

Many people ask me what started my fascination for snakes. My mother tells me that I have been chasing them ever since I could crawl on my knees. The start may have been further back when a snake dancing on my cradle cast a spell on me while, while I slept peacefully under it - my mother witnessed this incident rooted to the spot terrified all the while.
My actual work with snakes though started only when I took a year off from school to travel around India, learning snake handling at the Pune snake park, spider rearing at Madras, and croc handling under Romulus Whitaker at the Croc bank in Mammallapuran.
When I returned back to Goa in 1996 I wrote my first book titled ‘Free From School’. I also started snake catching in my village. Within a couple of years, I started getting calls from many villages in Bardez. I attend a snake call armed with my boots, a stick with a big hook at the end and a gym bag. The caught snake is then released back into the wild. This would usually mean my own backyard!
Though I have caught over four hundred snakes in the last eight years my excitement over every snake call still remains as fresh as it was in the beginning. Every call for me is like a surprise present unopened! And if it turns out to be a poisonous snake then it’s even better!
Another interesting part of snake catching is meeting the people in whose house the snake is. They are usually paranoid over the whole encounter and will want to know whether its partner will come to kill them at night and so on. Most of the calls therefore turn out to be hilarious, and when I relate the stories back at home to my family they are usually cracking with laughter. It was this whole charm of the snake call that prompted me to write my second book titled ‘The Call of the Snake.’
My interest in snakes also carried me to Thailand where I went specially to handle the king cobra - the largest venomous snake in the world. The experience was quite scary though, as the king cobra I was handling was well over fourteen feet!
I continue to write in Goa articles for local papers, my subject makes it easy as most people know next to little about snakes and any information I have to share with readers is interesting for them.
My hobbies include bodybuilding and listening to music. I also played for two heavy metal bands called Fetish Komb and the current 'Soggy Biscuit'.